Before Sam left for a recent deployment, he told me that the first months of his mission would be a crucial turning point in his navy career.  He would be told where in the world he was likely to be stationed for his next navy job and what he would be doing during this period of “shore duty.”

(For those of you who do not know what shore duty is, it’s a period of time—usually about two years—when they say sailors will be working more of a 9-6 schedule and traveling just a few days out of the month.)  

Many of Sam’s conversations about his job prospects for shore duty would take place with more senior officers on the boat, who had the ability to influence the navy’s decisions, while they were all underwater and incommunicado.  Consequently, I would not be apprised of these decisions until the day when Sam surfaced.  They would be discussing which jobs had opened up, where these jobs were located, what Sam would be doing if he took them, and how soon these jobs would begin.  Some positions would start two or three months after Sam returned from deployment, meaning that if he took one of them, we both would spend our brief post-deployment reunion finding a place and moving our joint belongings there.

For months, I was excluded from a conversation that would play a key role in the shape my life, my career path, and our relationship would take.  I thought:

Could I start looking at jobs in a nearby city where Sam could be stationed?  Or should I contemplate freelance work for the period when my current job ended and I would have the opportunity to be in the same city as Sam? 

Would Sam and I be flying from coast to coast every other weekend to see one another and planning Skype dates to accommodate our two different time zones? Or could we spontaneously connect after our respective workdays were over?  Would Sam and I have a few months of normal life—of cooking dinner together, watching the John Stewart show and Project Runway in the evenings, and planning Saturday outings to new hiking trails? Or should I scramble to save enough vacation days to allow for maximum travel time later on? The possibilities were endless and I was left contemplating broad hypothetical questions rather than the set of concrete paths that Sam was contemplating with a group of men on a boat.  

Job uncertainty is difficult to deal with under normal circumstances when your loved one is around, but it is especially trying when all you have of a relationship is the abstract prospect that you will spend time with each other soon.

During those few months, a growing sense of unease made my already difficult job as an activist more difficult, and I could not help but feel a little hopeless, thinking, will I have to choose between being with my love and pursuing work that is meaningful?  Is the report I am compiling right now a culmination of my still young career, or will it jump start me to greater opportunities?  If the latter, does that mean continuing to live apart from Sam?  I thought of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, in which she advises women “not to leave before you leave”—not to scale back on our ambitions and commitments to our current jobs in anticipation to leave the workforce to devote more time to our families.  This makes sense, but emotionally, I found myself in a state of limbo.  Leaning in, for me, feels less purposeful if I have to face an impossible choice imposed by people I don’t know.

In the end, Sam and I were more lucky than we might have been.  He came into port a few days before the official list of job possibilities was published and handed to him, though he was aware of what might be on it long before that.  We had decided that he would say nothing final about our preferences to the navy until we had discussed these possibilities and what they would mean for our relationship.  Sam held true to that, presenting me with a list of about 10 different jobs from Japan to Virginia.  During my face to face conversations with him during a port call, a surprising thing happened.  Rather than feeling as threatened as I might be about the far-flung ports where Sam could be stationed, I felt a sense of excitement at wherever we might end up together.  This was because I was at least being included in a decision-making process by Sam, who happened to be in port.  The navy had not done anything to make this easy for us. In the end, Sam requested and got a job that put us both in an advantageous place for our careers and our life together.

Why, given the navy's vested interest in recruiting partners into its volunteer work, do they fail to make them part of a conversation that affects them in equal measure?  What harm would there be in providing notice to partners who are waiting on shore about what the possibilities are under discussion, and to include them in these discussions?  The only answer I can think of is sheer negligence and incompetence on the part of naval authorities.

The navy intervenes in family relationships where they deem advantageous to them.  For example, when one woman married to an officer on the boat recently sent him an e-mail threatening to drain their joint bank account and leave if he did not return in several weeks, the captain intercepted the email and “ordered” her to go to therapy.  If only the navy made empowering interventions that kept partners informed of decisions affecting their own futures, perhaps such desperate situations would occur less often.

My life has two rhythms.  The first, increasingly common one is when Sam is gone and out of contact.  I fill my time with activities to keep myself happy. I cook elaborate meals, take up hobbies like creative writing and yoga, read a novel a day. I let my employer pile on extra projects and I arrive home from work at midnight.  I take trips to visit friends all over the country, reconnect with people I had lost touch with, put myself on complicated new diets that are supposed to transform my body and my outlook.  Recently I considered going to church, and I’m not even religious.  My life expands.

The second rhythm is when Sam returns.  You never know when Sam will return, because the navy will not tell you until the day before, and usually not even then.  So it happens like this:  Sam pops up on Skype or by phone one day after being at sea for weeks or months. 

My first feeling is joy.  I live for moments when I see the green Skype bubble pop up with “Sam is online” written under it, announcing that his boat has surfaced; or find a bunch of emails suddenly in my inbox, which Sam composed while he was at sea to send upon arrival. My love is back. The person I share my every thought with can now listen, respond, and tell me his. The one I share the same jokes with can laugh with me again.

The next feeling is anxiety.  Where do I find time for the person who has been incommunicado for months? What do I do about the work project I have to finish in an hour? The plans I made with my high school friend to have drinks in a few minutes?  The short story I was going to work on tonight? What if this is my only chance to talk with Sam for the next day or three or sixty?  Likely, Sam will have to go back to the boat and do work within the hour, or complete some bureaucratic formality, and will only be able to call the next day at some to-be-determined time.

So I drop most of the things I had been doing before and sync my schedule with Sam's.  My life contracts.

If Sam can only talk at 3 o’clock on Thursday afternoon, then that’s when I leave my office and find a quiet space.  If Sam can meet in Lisbon next week, then I’ll figure out a way to get there, pushing aside other parts of my life like so much brush in a jungle.

The same goes when Sam is in port.  If he calls at 2 p.m. and that is when he can talk, it will probably be my only chance that day.  It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing because if I want to talk to Sam to firm up plans for that night, I had better pause.  It’s even more fun when some officer interrupts that phone call that has interrupted my day, and I am put on hold. My life contracts. 

It mostly contracts in a wonderful way,, because of how I feel when I am with Sam.  I wonder if this is the same sense of love and demand that parents experience. There is no place where I am happier than at Sam’s side, and yet, the navy gives him so many needs.  If I want to be with him, I had better revolve around him. All our plans are for when he is free, and the margin of choice is almost nonexistent.

The whole pattern of dropping things to synchronize my schedule with Sam’s began a few years ago when I was taking karate.  We had just started dating. I was at class, dressed up in my white fighting pajamas and about to bow onto the mat.  My cell phone began ringing in the locker room behind me.  I had thought Sam would be away for three weeks, and this was a wonderful surprise. Also, I had something I needed to talk with him about and I hated the fact that we would have to wait.  Turned out, Sam’s trip to sea had been postponed by several days. I actually changed out of my uniform and drove the hour or so to his house, skipping class, my friends leaving worried messages on my phone after I left.  This was the moment when the pattern got set, when I was either on my own and filling the time, or at Sam’s beck and call.

Sam and I had a wonderful weekend together, I was increasingly in love.  And then he left, and I had to explain to my karate instructor why I ran out and to my friends why I cancelled that weekend. I stopped doing the most rash things like skipping out on class and friends, but I kept adjusting my life back and forth.

Can things be a different way?  Is it possible to be in a committed relationship with a service member and not be at his beck and call? I’ve thought about this a great deal. 

Well, for starters, let’s think about some of the changes the fucking powers that be can make, like making it commonplace and acceptable for service members to inform their spouses of their schedules as soon as they get set.  What if the military trust these spouses to take reasonable precautions with security just as they trust them to do the military’s work of taking care of service members?  

They can place more phones on the fucking boats and figure out a way for service members to get email while they are in port. 

Rather than embracing the image of spouses as support staff who dutifully organize their lives around service members, they can make it a part of navy culture for service members to ask their partners what their plans are and when they will be free each time they have the opportunity to, rather than taking for granted that they are the ones to be planned around.  Hell, the navy tries to dictate every other part of their lives.

I’ve been all too eager to accommodate, and I could certainly claim more time as my own; but I wonder what would happen if I turned the table and asked Sam to compromise more and build his time around mine; or if he asked himself.  My great fear, of course, is of never seeing Sam.  It is a real one.

How do milspouses and partners feel about the frequent military social events that you are expected to attend?

During the few months of the year when Sam resides on land, there are events planned for sailors of his boat nearly every weekend:  formal dinners, holiday parties, barbecues, nights out at bars, and the common “hail & farewells”—celebrations, usually at officers’ homes, during which the officers bid goodbye to one of their own and welcome the incoming officer replacing him. Only by negotiating with the captain does a sailor manage to get out of these events, but he cannot do this too much without looking like a defector. 

It takes effort to claim as your own the little time off work that you and your sailor are allotted.  Sam tries and succeeds to get more time for us to spend together and with our friends, but it pains me to think that he has to expend more energy than he already does wrestling with his demanding work schedule.

This forced socializing is ironic because of the military’s weak claim that it supports families.  By the “military,” here, I mean first and foremost its higher ranking officers. Take Sam’s captain, for example, who loves to croon at these collective gatherings about the importance of family, how the guys wouldn’t be able to do what they do without the support of their loved ones. Well, yes.  But if family is important, then do what you can to protect the little time that families have together rather than inserting yourself into every waking moment of their lives. I remember raising an eyebrow at the captain as the officers and their families sat one Friday night a few weeks ago at a local bar.  He was gushing over the wife of one officer cuddling her whimpering toddler:  “Look at that,” he said, “Mother and child.  Isn’t that special?”  I thought, it would probably be a lot more special if you weren’t the voiceover for this mother-child bonding, and the kid and his parents had the option to relax in their own home. 

On the last bloody weekend before Sam’s most recent deployment, the captain of his boat called a mandatory Friday night dinner in an upscale restaurant for all of the officers and their partners.  There was no way that Sam or I could have gotten out of this. Empty seats at the table would have announced our absence, and the only thing worse than going myself was the thought of Sam across from an empty seat where I should have been. Yet it was the last weekend we would have had together before Sam was about to leave for months without any contact.

Parents of young children were, of course, required to find and pay for their own babysitters, as they are with so many other navy events.

The inappropriateness of the timing made my blood boil.  Is it not enough to take service members away from their loved ones, with no contact for more than half of the year?  Can you not give people a single weekend before such a trying separation to be free to do as they please?

Don’t get me wrong; I love an occasion to see Sam dressed up, and to go out and do special things together like have a good meal.  Any excuse to do that isn’t all bad, and I never have a bad time out with Sam. I also love a few of the women who are married to officers on Sam's ship, and would choose to be with them regardless of the function. But this is about choice, and the navy gives you very little choice about how you spend your time off work.

The first time Sam invited me to one if these military events, I felt proud, excited, and touched; it was as if he was introducing me to his family, and in a small way, he was. But the navy is a little bit like a large conglomeration of in-laws who keep showing up at the worst times and demanding your undivided attention. To extend that metaphor, if your spouse were willing or able to keep a little bit more space between you and those in-laws, you'd like them more.

These navy events are organized for the service members and not for the families attending. At the pre-deployment dinner in question, more than half of the event was taken up by speeches by the captain and the higher ranking officers, honoring the president of the US, the US military, the war on terror, and the US’s dwindling group of allies in the war on terror. Next, the officers of the boat each stood up and did what they do at just about every gathering.  They gave speeches recognizing and honoring one another, full of inside jokes about individual officers' idiosyncrasies--some of these jokes misogynistic.

The officers on the boat laugh, some of the spouses laugh, other spouses smile politely and shift in their seats as their butts get numb from all the sitting and listening. Those attending are held captive in a way, especially when it is the higher ranking officers who are speaking.  As one of the readers wrote in response to my first post, she had to raise her hand to go to the bathroom during a captain’s speech at one such “dinner.”  Clearly these are not social gatherings among equals, but events infused with navy hierarchies, with spouses and of course, unmarried partners at the bottom.

Officers and their families are, as a rule, expected to help foot the bill at such gatherings. More than that, each officer is expected to host his own party at a bar or restaurant in which he buys drinks for the entire rest of the officers and their partners.  For the most common event, a “hail & farewell,” it is the wives and girlfriends who are asked by the officers to cook, so it’s their time, money, and energy being used.

Captains and Family Readiness Groups out there, here’s a task for you:  If you want families to be “ready” for the stresses of military life, then give them more time together and let them keep their money to spend on one another and their children.

I mentioned earlier that many of the qualities I love in Sam are also qualities that make him a great naval officer.  

What’s more, Sam’s navy lifestyle compliments my own lifestyle in ways.  He travels a lot, and so do I. Similar to me, Sam gets what it means to have a long-distance relationship as he has been having them with family and friends his entire adult life. We are consequently great communicators with one another. 

Here’s the kicker:  It is not enough to like these things about Sam’s job. Women in
relationships with service members are expected to support the military--ideologically and in terms of their time and professional sacrifices.

One spring day, I was shopping with two friends who are partners of guys on Sam’s boat. We were talking about our futures, and I said that Sam would likely stay in the navy. One friend, Renee, said forebodingly, “Ready to be the captain’s wife?”

My stomach tightened with anxiety for both Sam and I. Renee was referencing the fact that the higher your partner’s status, the more the military expects of you in his career. Especially if you’re a girl. (How many men does the navy photograph waving flags and holding babies as they welcome sailors home?) The spouses of incoming captains and second-in-commands even receive invitations to attend leadership trainings--invitations that are embedded, strikingly, in their husbands' official orders.
 
Even at this stage in my relationship with Sam, I have been asked variously by the other partners, Sam, and even Sam’s family to:

Cook for dinners among families on the boat; 

Purchase items and create care packages for officers to take to sea;

Represent officers’ families in the boat’s volunteer organization, the Family Readiness Group;

Donate to fundraisers for everything from the boat’s homecoming celebrations to the college educations of other service members’ children;

Be a public face of the military with Sam, appearing in the navy’s photographs next to weapons;

Cheer with the other spouses when the boat returns from sea; 

Spend time with all the other partners and spouses without Sam.

When I told Sam that I would not volunteer my time with the navy, he was forced to repeatedly explain my noninvolvement to confused colleagues.

Women’s ideological and practical support is the navy’s “normal.” It isn’t for nothing that we call partners of service members “milspouses,” “navy girlfriends” or “navy wives.”  In contrast, Sam does not carry an adjective next to his name to describe his indirect affiliation with my workplace.  

If you prefer not to have a relationship with military families, there are also pragmatic consequences:  You lose the ability to know the dates your partner returns from being at sea, as it is spouses and partners who communicate this information among themselves. If you’re not married to the service member you love, and you want to attend events on base and meet him when he comes home, then you have to latch on to one of the spouses who can escort you.  
 
To many, the forms of involvement I’m mentioning may seem insignificant. But if you are being coopted into an organization with which you have serious moral qualms, these expectations can feel oppressive.  It is not unlike if you were a Jew, Muslim, or atheist being evangelized to by Christians who ask you to cook for their church picnic, pray with them in Jesus’s name, and list your name as a parishioner in their newsletter, not to mention periodically passing you the offering plate—despite differences in belief. 

I am a pacifist, and the military, for me, is about state-sponsored violence.  While Sam talks about missiles and submarines with the same sense of duty that an eagle scout might talk about the gear he uses to lead scouts into the wilderness, I, upon watching Sam point to a freshly painted missile used to adorn the roads of his base, which he mentions is the same type used to attack Iraq, recall media images of bloodied civilians and children missing limbs.  

When I receive hysterically punctuated e-mails from women in the boat’s spouses’ group, entreating me to assemble boxes of goodies for deployed sailors who are “doing one of the most important jobs in the world!! keeping us safe!” I think, really? After a decade of military interventions that have had questionable implications for global security, I do not take for granted that the military keeps us safe.  Give me some information on what these guys are doing, and let me make an independent judgment.  Otherwise don't use me to promote your cause.

Spouses who serve as the optimistic, proud public face of the military are essential in legitimatizing its activities.  I choose not to participate in that, but from the start, everyone assumed that I would want to.

I am a part of the day-to-day aspects of the military effort, given the work of sustaining long periods without contact or Sam’s support, living with Sam in places where I have no community, and wrestling with my own demanding work schedule so that my vacations coincide with the ever-shifting slivers of time when Sam is available. 

I do this because I love and support Sam, trust that he has his own legitimate reasons for supporting the military, and want him to succeed.  But supporting the military ideologically?  Nope.

Sam, for his part, loves me precisely for my refusal to compromise my beliefs. He also does not want to be called anyone’s American hero, or for me to give up my career so he can pursue his.
 
I don’t judge those of us who want to be a part of the military; I admire their toughness and dedication. I do judge the assumption that everyone wants to extend this support, and in the same ways.  

This assumption hurts service members as well. What of sailors who do not want partners in these support roles, in an organization where spouses’ willingness to volunteer can influence service members’ promotions?  

What about women or gay service members, who are less likely than their heterosexual, male counterparts to find partners who will constantly relocate, sacrifice careers, and care for children alone?  
 
The consequences of a military that treats volunteerism as the default role for partners is systematic exclusion of unconventional service members and their families from meaningful, dignified engagement with military communities—engagement on their own terms.

Hi and welcome to Rocking the Boat! 

I’ve been dating a naval submarine officer for over two years now.  Let’s just call him Sam, as in Sam the Submariner.  We’ll call whatever mighty craft he is sailing at the moment the U.S.S. Submarine, and we’ll call me Tammy, as in, Tammy the Turbulent one.   

“Relational turbulence” is a word sometimes used by researchers studying military families to describe problems such as fighting, separation, and divorce among military couples—as though the difficulties that military families face are merely a disturbance to the order of battle, rocking the boat, so to speak. As a pun on that language, I’d like to use this blog to critique aspects of military culture and military policies that undermine human relationships--the long hours, the constant moves, and the presumption that partners believe in what the military does, to name just a few.

I don't love being in a relationship with a military officer.  I love, however, being in a relationship with Sam. That Sam is devoted to what he does and to an organization that he sees as doing good in the world, that he responds to stress with grace, that his sense of adventure is limitless, are qualities that I have admired in him from the start.  These are, in fact, strengths that Sam and I share, even if we apply them in different ways, to different causes.

This blog is a pressure valve to help me deal with the frustrations of military life, so that those frustrations are not taken out on Sam, who has his own legitimate reasons for choosing this path.  

There are many blogs out there by women whose husbands and boyfriends are in the navy.  The vast majority of these sites paint a picture of the spouses and significant others of service members as martyrs who sacrifice their own interests for a noble cause.  Yet plenty of us have serious gripes about the way the navy treats us and the sailors we love:  

Our partners’ 12-16 hour-days, in addition to one or two 24-hour periods spent on the boat each week;

No ability to predict our partners' work schedules, with periods at sea that get moved forward and backward by months with no notice. It is rarely us, but our partners, who determine when we have time together;

Greasy, sugar-laden food that sailors eat, sapping their energy and making some of them feel sick;

Little to no time allowed for sailors to get exercise, except, of course, for the rare token physical fitness test, scheduled at precisely the moments of time in port when sailors could be spending time with their families;

No systematic effort by the navy to make partners and spouses part of decisions that affect their entire families, such as frequent moves;

The presumption that partners will volunteer loads of time to support the military in collaboration with other spouses as part of the "military family," when in reality the only thing they may have in common with said spouses is shacking up with employees of the same workplace, and;

The inability to communicate with sailors for long periods of time.  This is due as much to regular failures in the navy’s email system and lack of adequate phone access while the boat is in port, as to security reasons while the boat is at sea;

Among other issues.

Yet there are few settings where criticism is acceptable.  I have mentioned some of my frustrations to the wives of senior officers, only to hear about my navy partner:  "But he's doing so much for this country," implying, of course, that my complaint negates his hard work. A friend of mine, another wife of a naval officer, recently confided that she feels guilty expressing frustrations about her husband's long hours and demanding job even to her own mother:  "I worry that anything other than pride or sadness would be perceived as unpatriotic and unsupportive," she said. 

My friend is not wrong.  For example, a guidebook entitled "Guidelines for the Spouses of Commanding Officers and Executive Officers" written by Naval Services FamilyLine, one of the navy's closely related volunteer groups, warns, "Be positive.  Whether you are discussing people, the command, the area you live in, or military life in general, speak positively or just say nothing."  Oh my. Now there is a way to model American freedom from the ground up.

Countless voices, from navy promotional brochures, commanding officers' speeches, and comments from the more self-righteous spouses of sailors, to the constant refrain from civilians, “Thank you for your service,” to Memorial Day Facebook posts that thank veterans for “protecting freedom” rather than using it as an opportunity to consider the costs that military families pay for its policies, leave little room for criticism.  After all, what asshole wouldn't want people to protect freedom?  Even the language Americans use to talk about the military undermines conversation.  These voices say: service members and the military are beyond reproach.

How have we come to a point where it is unacceptable to be critical of the military?  What are the frustrations of service members' partners?  These are questions I explore in this blog. 

This blog is a way to put another insider voice out there about the challenges and frustrations of military life, so that the only stories are not those of praise for the military and its policies towards families and the people who serve in it.  If there is one thing that my background as an activist has taught me, it is that a foundation for any change is a public conversation containing multiple voices, and not just one.



NOTE:
If it can be believed, this post is a trimmed down version of the original.  A concerned friend told me if I didn't put a check on my wordiness, I'd have trouble keeping readers.  Soon I will expand on details I included in the original post:  mandatory navy dinners at the worst possible times, monopolized by self-congratulatory speeches and insider jokes among the officers; expectations that spouses contribute vast amounts of time, energy, and money to support the officers, with no reciprocal effort from the latter; and class bias among officers' families, who sometimes speak of "enlisted" sailors and their families as a different kind of person, among other topics.  More on all of this soon.